Song for the Unraveling of the World

by Brian Evenson

  Which, indeed, as I knew all too well, it had.

  We have not come down from the tower, she and I. That is not to say that others have not come up, even those I once knew, looking for food, looking for help. They have not come down from the tower either, albeit for other reasons entirely. You will not find them. Indeed, there is no sign they were ever here.

  The Hole

  1.

  When the medical purser asked us when we had last seen Rurik, we hesitated before responding. Not because we had something to hide, but because we did not know at what point he would, to a mind like hers, no longer be Rurik.

  “Saw him alive, you mean,” we finally said.

  The interrogator nodded. “Alive,” she said. “Moving.”

  This confused us further. Alive and moving were not the same thing, at least not as far as Rurik was concerned.

  “We … I’m not sure,” we slowly offered.

  She glanced at the security officer. He regarded his equipment and gave a slight nod meant to be imperceptible to anyone but her. It was not, however, imperceptible to me.

  “Approximately,” she said.

  “Why, after my ordeal, am I being restrained?” we asked, although we knew. “Why have you bound me? I will answer your questions quite willingly. There is no need to restrain me.”

  “For your own protection,” she lied.

  “What do I need to be protected from?”

  She chose not to answer this.

  “Where have the rest of the crew gone?” we asked, although we knew.

  “They are out searching for Rurik,” she said. “And for you. Only a few more questions,” she said, “and then I’ll free you of the restraints.” This, we suspected, was a lie.

  “Fine,” we said. “Ask your questions.”

  “How long ago?” she asked again.

  “Two days ago, maybe three.”

  “A few days ago?” she said, surprised. “You must be mistaken. His recirculation system wouldn’t have lasted so long. He couldn’t have still been alive then.”

  “No?” we said, realizing our misstep. “Perhaps you are right. Out there, it is so difficult to keep track of time.”

  She looked to the security officer again and the man almost imperceptibly shook his head. “Where did you see him?” she asked. Her voice was harsher now.

  We hesitated again, until there seemed no choice but to proceed.

  “He was in a hole,” we said.

  “A hole.” We nodded. “What kind of hole?” she asked.

  “A deep one.”

  “He was alive?”

  “What else would he be?”

  Again, she glanced at the security officer, who this time neither nodded nor shook his head.

  “When you saw him, in this hole, are you certain he was alive, yes or no?” she asked.

  We hesitated yet again. How to answer? It depended, we supposed, on what she meant by alive and by him. Or what, for that matter, she meant by you.

  We shrugged. “He was moving,” we said.

  2.

  The hole was, as we would later tell the medical purser, a deep one, although it was more than that. It was the kind of hole one might not see until one was right on top of it, on the verge of falling in. I found the hole that way, or perhaps it found me, as I searched for Rurik, and before I knew it, I was at the bottom of it.

  We had scarcely arrived, our engines hardly idle, when Rurik went missing. Nobody even knew he had left—one moment he was there and the next gone. Security footage showed him climbing into his gear, affixing his headpiece, and exiting through the hatch, and that was all. The tracking device that was part of his gear either had malfunctioned or had been deliberately disabled. He was simply gone.

  The ten of us remaining debated what to do. Had he been acting strangely? Had there been any sign that something was wrong? Some thought yes, others no. But none of us in any case could bring ourselves to leave him. He was the captain after all. So, while the medical purser and the security officer remained with the vessel, the rest of us fanned out, searching for Rurik.

  We each were assigned a direction and given an additional backup recirculation unit. I was to walk due northeast from the vessel, repeatedly calling Rurik’s name. I was instructed to walk for two days, and then turn around and walk back. I was to keep my eyes open and if I saw anything that stood out against the gray landscape, I was to examine it to determine if it had anything to do with Rurik.

  I set off. At first, I heard the other crewmembers also calling his name, the sound becoming fainter and fainter as we moved farther from the vessel and from one another. Probably, I believed back then, Rurik was dead, and we would never find him. He had a recirculation system that would last no more than five days. He had been gone two days already, and we had heard nothing from him. Something must have befallen him.

  The landscape was gray, unvarying, the ground covered with a thick loam that absorbed the noise of my boots. My cries too seemed dampened despite being artificially amplified. There was, as there had been since we landed, a fog—not too thick but thick enough that after five minutes the vessel was only a vague shape behind me. Five minutes more, and it had vanished entirely.

  I walked perhaps six hours. After the first hour, I was hoarse from calling Rurik’s name, and from then on did so only intermittently. I saw little of note. Sometimes I would deviate from the path long enough to investigate a rare irregularity—a slight buckling of the earth, a strange rusted metal gear from who knew what sort of machine, a half-buried femur easily the length of my full body.

  When it grew dark, I stopped. I unfolded a thermal blanket, wrapped it around me, and tried to sleep.

  Did I sleep? Yes, I think so, and had dreams as well, though I have since come to question whether the dreams were in fact my own. In one, the creature possessed of the gigantic femur I had found loomed over me, sniffed at me, and then, rumbling, turned away. In another, I was Rurik himself, back aboard the vessel, hearing voices, always voices, no matter where I went. They whispered softly, too softly to hear, but an understanding was beginning to form nonetheless. The final dream (or at least the last one I remember) was the worst of all—me, as I was then, just then, Klim, alone, walking a straight line through an endless waste.

  In the morning, I awoke with a start. I was stiff, my head foggy, and for a moment I knew neither where nor who I was. And then I was up, folding up my blanket, eating something sucked through the tube in my headpiece, checking again that my primary recirculator was affixed and still functional. Soon after, I started on my way.

  I traveled perhaps five hundred meters when I realized that the ground directly before me was not ground at all, but a hole somehow nearly the same color as the ground itself. Before I could stop myself, I had plunged in.

  For a time—I don’t know how long—I was unconscious. When I came to, I was lying on my back on an irregular, lumpy surface, looking up at the smooth shaft rising above me, the walls so regular it was hard to believe they had been formed naturally. I examined my readouts. The recirculator was still there, unbroken, functioning. The spare one too was still in my pack, seemingly undamaged.

  At first I thought, How is this likely, that in the flatness and sameness of this place I manage to fall into a hole? In all the time I had walked, it was the only hole I had glimpsed, and I had only glimpsed it as I was falling into it.

  But such reflections were curtailed when I felt something beneath me move.

  I scrambled quickly as far away as I could, which was not far. I groped for my weapon but didn’t find it—I no longer had it. I turned on my light, and there, in the glow, was Rurik.

  Or, rather, what was left of him. Both of his legs were broken, jagged bits of bone visible, the floor of the hole sticky with blood. His legs had begun to go black and were rotted through. If I hadn’t been wearing my headpiece, no doubt I would have found the stench unbearable. His own headpiece was removed, lying shattered to one side. His body was f
ar gone, livid where it wasn’t outright black and suppurating. He hadn’t moved, I told myself—he was well beyond the possibility of movement. The body must have simply shifted or settled under my weight.

  I was still telling myself this when one of his eyes, the left one, swiveled toward me, the other eye moving in the opposite direction.

  “Ah,” he said through bits of broken teeth. “Klim. How nice of you to drop in.”

  I screamed. I cried for help. Of course, nobody came. I kept my distance from Rurik, and kept my eyes on him. Very slowly, he pulled his body up and dragged it until he was seated with his back against the shaft’s wall.

  When it seemed clear he intended no harm, I turned my back on him long enough to test the wall, look for handholds, a way up. The wall was smooth. There was nothing.

  “Go ahead, Klim,” he said once I turned back. “Test it for yourself. You will find there is no way out alone. Still, better for you to feel that you have tried everything before we strike a deal.”

  “You’re not alive.” I gestured at his broken headpiece. “You can’t be.”

  “And yet we speak. But of course you’re right. Technically, not alive.”

  It is difficult for me to explain what happened in the hours that followed. It is not the sort of thing one can understand without experiencing it oneself. At first I was incredulous: I had struck my head in the fall, I was still unconscious, imagining things. Or I was still five hundred yards back, asleep in my thermal blanket, dreaming.

  “No,” he said, though I had said nothing aloud. “You’re not dreaming.”

  I was hurt then, legs broken, in the bottom of a hole, delirious.

  “Your legs are fine,” he said. “You had the good fortune of being able to use Rurik to break your fall.”

  In the hole he spoke like that, sometimes referring to himself in the third person, sometimes in the plural, more rarely just as I, as if he were sorting out who exactly he was and where he began and ended. Or as if he were speaking an unfamiliar language and trying to make sense of the eccentricity of a new logic of pronouns.

  “I’m insane, then,” I said. “I’ve gone mad.”

  “No, Klim,” he said. “You’re as sane as you’ve ever been.”

  We talked longer, for what else was there to do but talk? He spoke, often exactly as Rurik would, as if trying to prove to me that he was Rurik—or to himself perhaps. After a time, not knowing how to keep disbelieving what was happening to me, I entered into the spirit of it, and began to interrogate him about things only Rurik would know.

  “There, you see?” he said at last, once he had passed my tests. “Do you have any doubt that this is Rurik?”

  “But how can you be alive?”

  He smiled, his lips splitting open. “As I already said, we are not alive.”

  “We?” I said. “Am I dead as well, and this is some kind of hell that we inhabit?”

  He shook his head. “You misunderstand Rurik,” he said. And then with some effort, “You misunderstand me. I am not alive.”

  “What is this place?”

  He shrugged. “A hole,” he said. “Simply a hole.”

  I stood and examined the walls again. “I have to find a way out of here,” I said.

  He shook his head. “You can’t escape,” he said. “Or at least you can’t escape without me.”

  For a time, the dead man—if he was in fact dead and not merely not-alive (though what the difference between the two might be remained obscure to me)—continued to talk, a rambling patter that I could make little sense of. What is a body but a body? he asked. And what does it matter what animates it? If memories are the memories of Rurik among others, who is to say we are not Rurik? In the way that you can make the pain of a toothache migrate from your tooth to your hand by digging your nails into your palm, so too so much that we see as stationary, flesh encased and immovable, is at heart profoundly fugitive.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  He sighed. At least I think it was a sigh. “You want to get out and I want to get out. In this body, these broken limbs,” he gestured, “no, impossible. There is not much left of Rurik. But you, Klim. There is a great deal left of you. And you, I would venture to say, do not need all that is left. You are like a hole waiting to be filled.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “Two brothers broke bread together and though it was not a meal sufficient for one, neither went hungry,” Rurik said, offering a mutilated version of a tale that I had heard him tell before, back when he was the captain of the vessel rather than a not-living man in a hole. “I am asking you to share so that I can partake,” he said.

  “Share?”

  “Just as, near the end, Rurik agreed to share. There is room,” he said, and smiled. “You have so much extra room.”

  He had slipped down from the wall, and now he tried to push himself up again, the little flesh left on his hands sloughing away. He made it only partway and so leaned there as if about to pitch to one side, like an ill-made puppet, a doll.

  “You know, of course, we can kill you,” the limp Rurik creature said. “But we would prefer not to. We would prefer instead for you to invite us in. We can work together, serve one another. You can join us, and we can join you. It will be more pleasant for all of us, and more productive.”

  Pressed against the far wall, I said nothing.

  “But of course, if you prefer to be killed, then we shall oblige you.”

  “And if I kill you?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Good one, Klim,” he said once he was done. “A very good one. How can you kill me when it has been so long since I was alive?”

  I lasted several days. “Don’t wait too long to decide,” the Rurik creature cautioned. “Remember, you must have sufficient charge in your backup recirculator to make it back.”

  Or else, “We could be such friends. Such good, good friends.”

  Or later, “You think it must be terrible. This is simply because you can’t imagine it.”

  Or later still, “You will say to yourself, do I prefer to die or shall I take this chance? Perhaps it isn’t so bad. Perhaps it is better than being dead. And perhaps, even if it is so bad, I will one day escape.”

  Even if he was dead, even if I could not kill him, perhaps I could stop him from talking. And so, I charged at him and kicked him and kicked an opening in his side. From that hole came something long and whiplike, thin as ganglia yet strong and wiry. It wrapped around my wrist and then, when I tugged it free, split in two and took my other wrist as well. Each time I peeled it off and started to struggle free it further ramified and split. Soon it was wrapped about me tightly, like a net, and had brought me to my knees.

  It held me there, facing Rurik, only inches away. He now looked purely dead, as if he had never been alive.

  And then I watched one of the tendrils that held me unfurl and meander its way back to the body, feeling its way up it and into its nose, wriggling and pulsing deeper and deeper in, all the while never releasing its grip on me.

  Rurik shuddered, opened one deflated eye.

  “It’s time,” Rurik said. “You will join us. Shall it be willingly or no?”

  3.

  We had hoped to be able to retain the medical purser and the security officer intact, as a means of learning to interact properly with others of the species, and for this purpose had chosen to return to the vessel as if confused, claiming to have been lost, rejoicing to have found the vessel again at last. Even late in the game, we thought we might manage to convince them to untie us and accept us as human. But when they drew their weapons and began to threaten the Klim body, it seemed expedient to kill them. We have grown attached to the Klim body—perhaps because it is the only one of this species we have inhabited for any length of time while it was still alive. But perhaps it is more than that.

  We extruded a part of ourselves, two parts of ourselves, and insinuated each of them, bringing what we could back to
join what was already there: ourselves, then Rurik, then Klim, then finally the eight other crewmen we had reached out to, lured, and coaxed, one by one, down into the hole, and whose dead bodies we had possessed long enough to force them to climb on top of one another so as to allow us to climb out of the hole.

  And so here we are, here he is, here I am, on this vessel, alone—if alone is the right word. Everything awaits him. From here, I can go anywhere.

  As indeed we shall.

  A Disappearance

  I.

  In late November, three weeks after his wife disappeared, Gerard sold their city apartment and moved to a small isolated house in the countryside. He had been planning to sell the house before she disappeared—or rather, they had been planning to sell, he quickly corrected: it had not been his idea, but theirs, he stressed, long before her disappearance. Together they had come over time to hate life in the suburbs, had begun to crave a peaceful, simple life. And so, they had made up their minds together to sell the apartment and buy a small isolated house in the countryside. They would take one last trip to the seashore, for old times’ sake, and then they would sell their apartment and move. Was he to be blamed, he wanted to know, now that she was gone, for having proceeded individually as they had always meant to proceed together?

  No, I said, by all means no. I wasn’t blaming him for anything.

  But of course, privately, I was blaming him. How could I not? It was he who had taken her to the seashore in the first place, setting in motion the sequence of events that would end in her disappearance. It was he who had gone to the seashore with his much younger wife, and then he who had come back without her.

  The details of her disappearance remained vague to him. One moment she was beside him in the surf and the next she was gone. He had, he claimed, run up and down the beach shouting her name, had even plunged chest deep into the surf and felt around for her. But she simply wasn’t there.

  “So, you think she drowned,” I said.

  “How do I know?” he asked. “Is she dead? Is she alive? Yes?” She could be dead, perhaps drowned, he admitted, a sudden wave dragging her far out to sea and into deep water. But maybe she was alive, abducted, taken by someone, suddenly, right from under his very nose. There was, after all, no body: there was always a chance she was still alive.